Even by the time she was slouching into the passenger seat of his car at 3 a.m. on December 26th, Amelia wasn't sure it had hit her yet that she was about to get nearly two weeks of uninterrupted time with Henry. On another continent.

She was too sleepy to think clearly, much less speak, but she instinctively reached over to hold his hand once she'd buckled her seatbelt. He seemed more alert than she was, an obvious necessity considering that he was the one driving. They'd only tossed around the idea of taking an Uber, which would have been exponentially more cost-effective than parking at the airport, for all of five seconds. Given the recent circumstances, neither of them was comfortable with the thought of getting in a stranger's car in the middle of the night.

This was much more pleasant, anyhow. She could close her eyes and let herself doze off a little bit for the twenty-minute ride, to listen to the faint hum of heat blowing out of the air vents and the oddly soothing, repetitive click-clack of the car's turn signals.

"We can get coffee at the airport," Henry murmured to her.

Amelia nodded. She wanted to try to sleep on the plane, of course, but because they'd be crossing so many time zones, she would be less jetlagged if she could hold off on napping until the last few hours of their flight. Their plane was due to land in Rome around midnight and they'd be driving to Florence from there, so she'd have another few hours to rest while it was too dark to see any of the scenery out the windows anyhow. And she didn't feel particularly as though she'd be missing out on anything—the same views would be there when they eventually left Florence and headed back toward the south.

Their travel itinerary was apparently a tried and true one, the same route the family usually took when they came to visit Robert and Teresa's parents every couple of years. Fly into Rome, then make the drive up to Florence and stay there for a few days. That was the part Amelia was most looking forward to. Considering that Florence was widely regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance, it was any artist or historian's dream to see it at least once, and she was also told that it was a great place for tourists to get acclimated to Italy because it was easy to navigate by foot and teeming with amazing sights and restaurants. Then they'd drive down to the little coastal town where Henry's dad and aunt grew up, which was where they'd meet his grandparents and enjoy a couple of laid-back days listening to the sounds of the sea and simply enjoying everyone's company while their sore bodies recovered from running around Florence. That way they could go up to Rome with plenty of energy to explore the massive city and make the most of the last several days of their trip before they had to fly home.

It was exciting enough to make her pulse quicken with anticipation despite her current fatigue. She'd barely even traveled halfway across the United States before, much less halfway across the world, and yet the prospect wasn't actually all that intimidating since the majority of their group spoke at least a little bit of Italian. Henry claimed to not know much of the language at all, but she sensed he was underselling himself to keep her expectations low. Amelia was very intrigued to see firsthand how much he managed to pull off.

Getting through airport security wasn't as horrible as she would have expected—the fact that it was the day after Christmas was somewhat offset by the fact that they were leaving on one of the earliest flights of the day. Once they were at their terminal, they stopped at the first water fountain they found to fill up the empty water bottles they'd brought with them for the plane. Amelia stifled a yawn and Henry asked her if she wanted him to go find that coffee he'd promised her. She obviously did, so they decided that he could pick something out for her while she went ahead with their bags to find a place to sit at their gate before it got crowded. There was no telling if the line at the coffee shop would take five minutes or thirty.

She didn't see anyone else from their group at the gate yet, so she drifted over to a row of chairs against the wall and plopped herself down, too sleepy to do much of anything besides stare blankly at their bags. She might have texted her parents were it not four in the morning, but as it was, she decided to hold off until their layover.

A smile threatened to tug at her lips when she looked up and saw Lily and Liam walking over, hand in hand. No stranger would have been able to guess that they had just been separated for nearly three months—they somehow still seemed to fit together with ease even though it hadn't been easy for them at all.

The disheveled bun of hair atop Lily's head swayed slightly as she plopped herself into the seat next to Amelia. She glanced around for a second, likely searching for Henry.

"I decided to be lazy and let him get my coffee," Amelia explained, which seemed to give his cousin a spark of inspiration.

Liam hadn't sat down and probably wasn't going to get the chance to yet—Lily was giving him a silent look as if telepathically asking if he wanted to pull a Henry and fetch her some coffee, too.

It didn't take him very long to cave, his expression softening as she looked up at him with her biggest puppy dog eyes. "Alright, what do you want?"

She smiled at him. "Surprise me."

Amelia was told that the parents had stopped to grab some substantial breakfast, which was really what the four of them also should have been doing right now, but it was simply too far against the nature of a depressed twenty-something to properly take care of themselves instead of just pumping their bodies full of caffeine and pretending it was proper sustenance.

And so, if only for the meantime, Amelia and Lily were the lone ones sitting there. The two girls who had barely even met and yet still knew so much about one another.

She had expected that they might sit there in sleepy silence, so it was to her slight surprise that Lily turned toward her and asked, "How are you?"

"Feeling a little bit better every day," she shrugged.

It was the best answer she could come up with this early in the morning while still being genuine, and there was no point in bullshitting anything when Lily knew full well that it had taken her a few weeks to even be able to look Henry in the eye. "How about you?"

"That about sums it up."

The younger girl certainly looked very tired, but it relieved Amelia to see that the weariness seemed more purely physical than psychological for the time being. This morning, the heaviness didn't make it all the way to her eyes which had looked so fondly at Liam. She was wearing leggings and a tee shirt that was loose enough on her that it was quite possibly his.

"It feels a little weird that I want a change of scenery right now..." she admitted as somewhat of an afterthought, a little more quietly. "But here I am, wanting a break from the life that I just got back."

Amelia was slowly nodding and trying to string together the right words to communicate that there was nothing wrong with how overwhelmed Lily must have been feeling about all of these adjustments when she spotted Henry coming over with their coffee. Judging by the transparent cups, he'd grabbed himself either a black coffee or an americano and something much milkier for her.

He smiled when he saw the two of them sitting together. Amelia shifted over to offer him the seat between them. The letters WM for white mocha—one of her favorites—were scrawled in sharpie on the cup that he handed her, and even though she hated subjecting anyone else to public displays of affection, she leaned over and gave him a swift kiss.

"You're welcome," he murmured before turning to Lily. "I should have checked to see if you wanted anything."

"Don't worry, Liam's working on it," she waved him off, looking mildly amused about the kiss.

Amelia remembered what Henry had said about never introducing Lily to any of his girlfriends before and then wondered if it was odd for her to see him in a serious relationship with someone after all this time, especially given the timing of it. It was hopefully at least a good kind of odd, that it made her happy to see him be happy with someone.

But these were questions to ask at another time—right now, Amelia wanted to just be.

And as she slipped her free hand into Henry's, when she saw the peace that washed into his expression when Lily rested her head on his shoulder, she knew that he was happy to finally just be with both of them, too.

Amelia and planes didn't get along too well.

She shouldn't have been complaining—at least they didn't make give her motion sickness—but she'd always found it infuriatingly impossible to get comfortable in such a confined space. It didn't ease her nerves that the longest flight she'd ever been on had only lasted a few hours and now she was going to be stuck on one across the entire Atlantic Ocean.

No one else seemed to be too bothered by it and when it got late enough in the day that they could afford to go ahead and get some rest, Henry had the advantage of switching off his hearing aids to tune out the vast majority of the background noise and trusting her to wake him up if something important happened. Meanwhile, Amelia contorted her neck and torso into what felt like twenty different sleeping positions, but even with the blanket and teeny tiny pillow that the airline had provided, some part of her body always started cramping just as she was starting to doze off.

Henry slowly woke up on his own after a couple of hours, his fingers drifting up to his ears to switch his hearing aids back on. When he looked at her and realized that she had gotten no rest whatsoever, he placed both of their pillows in his lap and gestured for her to lie down. She closed her eyes and felt him tuck her in under their blankets, and it was only then that she finally managed to gradually drift off into the arms of sleep.

She only got to stay there for an hour or so before the pilot came over the intercom to announce that they'd be landing shortly. She quietly sighed against the pillow when the noise jolted her awake, but Henry must have heard her. His fingers carefully brushed her hair behind her ear, coaxing her to stay there if she wanted to.

And so she did until the plane finally touched down on the tarmac. She was still half-asleep as she trudged down the aisle and back onto solid ground, and although sitting in a car for another few hours sounded abysmal, it wasn't as if she was awake enough to do anything else. They'd rented a van—it was the only thing big enough to carry all eight of them and their luggage—which hopefully meant that she'd have more room to stretch out this time around. Hell, she'd sleep on the floorboard if she had to. And even if this ride did suck, at least they wouldn't be dealing with it again before their flight out of Rome at the end of the trip.

It turned out that she very much needed those few hours of sleep. She shut her eyes as soon as the car was in motion and didn't open them again until she awoke to the sound of the others whispering excitedly amongst themselves—they were getting close to the villa where they'd be staying in Florence. It was apparently owned by Henry's extended family, another reason why the city was always a stop on their Italy vacations.

Amelia was too groggy to process the particulars of that conversation and it was too dark outside to see much of anything until they pulled onto the quaint little street where the villa was, but she was able to quickly blink much of her sleepiness away when someone opened a door and the chill of a December night crept into the van all at once. Her breath clouded in the air when she clambered out and stared up at the building in front of them, illuminated by the glow of an old lantern that hung by the front door.

The villa itself was three stories tall and made of a cream-colored stucco, the flat planes of the walls broken up by a narrow balcony on each floor. They were separated from the front garden by a metal gate, which swung open for them when Teresa punched a code into its keypad. Amelia couldn't see enough yet to ogle—it was barely pushing 4 in the morning—but she knew she'd be spending plenty of time gawking at everything once the sun rose later.

Until then, the best use of their time was to get settled into rooms to shower off the grime of their travels and—for those like her who hadn't slept well on the plane—get a few more hours of shut-eye. There were apparently eight bedrooms in total, ample space for them to spread out as much as they wanted to, and each floor had a bathroom.

The bedrooms took up the top two floors and supposedly varied in size, but Amelia wasn't picky about which one she ended up in. She simply snagged the first one she got to at the top of the stairs. On one wall, floor-to-ceiling curtains framed a door connecting to a balcony, but what she cared about the most right now was the queen-sized bed. She didn't even bother changing clothes or crawling under the blankets before laying her head against the pillows and quickly slipping back into sleep.

It was the sun that eventually crept in and woke her up a couple of hours later—she hadn't closed the curtains, but that was alright. She'd overall gotten a solid six hours of sleep by then and needed to freshen up before they adventured out anywhere.

Everyone else seemed to have done things in the opposite order as her and showered right when they arrived at the villa, so the bathroom on her floor was vacant. The water was lukewarm and yet she found that it was more refreshing than a hot shower would have been and did much more to wake up her mind.

She felt exponentially better by the time she returned to her room, her hair soggy hair thrown up in a towel. The soft stream of light from the balcony beckoned her outside, but that wasn't going to happen while she was still in a bathrobe, so she rummaged through her suitcase for an appropriate outfit. She was certain that they'd do a lot of walking today, but her phone informed her that it was also only a brisk forty degrees out, so she opted for a sweater and jeans.

Now that she was alert, she began to absorb her surroundings a little more thoroughly and noticed that the drawer on the nightstand was slightly ajar. Curiosity got the best of her and she went over to investigate, tugging on the old wood very gently. Inside she found a small book, which by the looks of it had been sitting in there for a long time. Its paper cover was frayed and she didn't know enough about Italian to be able to guess what the title meant, but as she started to flip through the yellowing pages she realized it must be poetry. There was a steady knock on her door.

"It's me," Henry's voice said.

"You can come in."

A small smile crept onto his lips when he saw that she no longer looked like a member of the undead.

"You get some sleep?" he guessed.

She nodded and beckoned him over to her. "I want to show you something."

As he sat down at her side, her fingers were still toying through the pages of the poetry book. She stopped on a spread containing several short poems and passed it to him.

"Can you tell what any of it means?"

"I think so..." he told her, concentrated, as his eyes scanned down the first of the poems. She leaned over to read along with him.

Come ti vidi

M'innamorai,

E tu sorridi

Perchè lo sai.

"...But I'd have to ask my dad to know for sure."

"Are you not even going to tell me what you think it means?" she pouted and he grinned.

"It's much more fun to keep you on your toes. Besides, it's time for coffee again."

He did know the way to her heart.

They headed down to the garden to meet up with the others. Rob and Jen were already there, looking as awake and at ease as if it were any other morning and they hadn't just jumped ahead seven time zones. Then again, this was far from their first time doing this, so they'd probably figured out all of the tricks for recovering from jetlag.

They asked her how she'd slept and assured her that they were less than a ten-minute walk from the nearest cafe, which was also the closest place to buy bus tickets if they chose to do so, though they were close enough to the city center that it might be more fun to go on foot and get to explore more of the streets that only accommodated pedestrian traffic. It was only a couple of minutes before Teresa and Daniel and Lily and Liam had all made their way outside and they were ready to officially start their first day in Florence.

When they turned off of their little side street, Amelia realized that they were on a hill, the road sloping downwards. The woods all around them were beautifully placid—only a couple of cars passed them on the street, so the whole world seemed to be moving at a slower pace than back home—but she didn't have any good bearings yet on where they were in relation to anything else.

After a few minutes of just soaking in her surroundings, she leaned over to Henry and whispered, "So, where are we?"

"Italy," he offered.

"You know what I meant."

"Okay, okay," he laughed under his breath. "We're just south of the river. Pretty much everything you'll want to see is right across on the north side."

"So...not far?"

"See for yourself."

She didn't ask what he meant—the sidewalk took a sharp curve ahead and she suspected that just beyond that would lie whatever he meant for her to see. But even though she was expecting it, she still sucked in an awed breath when they rounded the corner.

It was like the Arno River had simply materialized right in front of their eyes—they were only a few hundred feet away from the first of the old bridges that crossed it and led straight into the heart of Florence, towards the cathedral that loomed above everything else like a fortress.

The city looked just like it did in the postcards, a sea of red-tiled roofs interrupted by the bright white stone of the church, and she suddenly understood completely why so much time had been dedicated to it in her art history classes back in college. She remembered that its massive dome was the largest in the world at the time it was constructed and the architect—Brunelleschi, was that his name? It was definitely something that started with a B—was hailed as a genius for pulling it off without needing external supports to keep it from falling under its own weight. He had in essence kickstarted the Italian Renaissance.

"I can't remember the name..." she muttered, thinking aloud. "Santa Maria something?"

Henry's dad glanced over his shoulder at her, looking mildly pleased, and Amelia somehow only then realized that as both an Italian citizen and their resident history nerd, he was going to be the perfect person to pester with even her more niche questions.

"Santa Maria del Fiore," he helped her out, and it was Amelia's turn to feel pleased that she was right.

In addition to the stellar view, they were also now right by the coffee shop.

She couldn't have been more excited to try some authentic Italian espresso, but what she hadn't even been thinking about beforehand was the pastry case. Her jaw almost dropped when she was faced with every variety of delicate pastry that she could have imagined. Some were topped with berries, others filled with custard and sprinkled with powdered sugar.

"Is that one chocolate?" she asked quietly to literally anyone who would be able to answer, ogling at a particularly sweet-looking one in the bottom row of the glass case.

"Nutella, actually," Teresa explained from next to her, looking like she was eyeing the same flavor. "Did you know it originated here in Italy?"

Oh, Amelia was definitely going to like it here.